Osprey Sailing Dinghy

There is much to be said for "pre-cruise season. Firstly, there is no crab traps. Secondly, there are no bugs (in general). And if it is enough Earlier in the season, there will be no boatmen, whatever, the relaunching of their boats in the early hours of the morning and driving on the track. You've caught the oyster and the beginning of the crab season, when they are more likely to work on their boats or preparing their traps.

You will certainly see an osprey well. We made this rainy morning in April, when his brother Henry, sister-in-law Pat and I left Shipwright Harbor Marina in Deale, Md., on their Gulf Star 44 INSSA, bound for the river Honga. As we spent the day marker at the mouth of motorized Rockhold Creek, a pair of nesting ospreys berate us in no uncertain terms - roughly translated, their speech was something like this: "Do not go near or I'll cut your face with my razor-sharp beak and you feed fish. "We paid them no mind.

INSSA cut in Herring Bay, like the rain that had been constantly drops for three days of respite. Brother Henry and the beautiful Miss Pat has been planning a summer trip to Canada. This little trip is the shakedown cruise in the spring. Henry was slightly incredulous when I first proposed the idea. "The Honga" he said, eyebrows raised. "Nobody goes Honga."

"Of course they do," I said. "Many people, in fact."

Honga River is located on the east coast, opposite the mouth of the Patuxent River and Solomons Island, and not all that far to the north of the Potomac. Protected by Hooper Islands (Upper, Middle and Lower), west and swampy plains along the east, the River 12-mile long supply ports of a half-dozen sailors, with a couple of work camps and crab packing houses start. For boats that can make Back Creek, there are also Old Salty's, a longstanding restaurant occupies the former Hooper Island school. But here's the rub: While cuts deep channel in the middle of the river from the Hooper Strait since fishing for brook, Honga in most places is very shallow. Regardless of the thin water, we went anyway. I wanted to do it simply to lay eyes on the place where the Claude W. Somers down on March 4, 1977.

It is a story I can not move. I wrote about this once for this magazine [see "Good Men Down", March 2005], and I want to write a song about her since. Some people catch the bay in paint, some with a camera. I try to catch the bay music, put the history of the bay, people and animals in my words. The history of the Claude W. Somers is one of many topics that I wore on, but for some reason, the muse had so far been elusive. I thought maybe going to the Honga at the beginning of spring and see for myself when the boat sank shake lose a bit of inspiration.

As we moved across the bay the wind has dropped considerably and the waves whitecapped set in Matte Tin wrinkles. The sun had hidden behind a blanket of clouds and the air was chilly. Far ahead, the plain of the East Coast has hovered on the horizon. We passed the leaning tower of Sharps Island lighthouse - it is so difficult to imagine the land mass that once there, with churches, houses, farms. It's like Atlantis Bay. Then came the long past Barren Island.

We rejected the Barren Island Gap, which led, among a strip of marsh on the north and the rest of the Barren Island to the south by the narrow bridge between the mainland and the island of Upper Hooper and the area north of the river and the community Honga fishing Creek. We would need local knowledge before we tried something like that. The boatmen use this channel fairly regularly, but the table said we would find three feet of water in a particular leg. With the wind from the north-east, W.